Thanks, yeah, I fully accept that.
It’s not changing the player I’m concerned about as they are cheap enough now.

what I’m kinda saying is:

For maximum compatibility, if other drives/players can cope with many disks, then for ultimate compatibility, if you find something that plays on the Toshiba, then perhaps it will play on pretty much everything else also?

Then again, perhaps not!

Say, you burned a home movie, and wanted to lend it to all your friends and family, then the most compatible disk (that even played on fussy/poor Toshiba’s) would be good.

No?

I was told that new “Verbatim MCC 03RG20” disks would be the closest NEW thing to my old “Verbatim MCC 01RG20” disks I bought a few years ago.

I think I’ll get some to complement my Verbatim TYG03 disks I currently find are the best.

I would try Verbatim 16x -R discs, yes. They are commonly found, good discs, and often on sale.

I wouldn’t say Toshiba players are bad, older players in general are often picky with dye-based DVD media, that’s all. Some of the least picky of players are the cheapo generic players, that doesn’t make them better players though. If a disc plays in a very picky player then yes, it is obviously a good sign for compatibility. But it’s still not a guarantee that the disc will play in another player that’s less picky.

I would agree. A picky player doesn’t necessarily have to have top quality burns for a disk to play, but rather just needs a good burn on a disk type that it gets along with. It just might not like certain media. For instance, say the Toshiba likes brand a disks and plays them fine, but not brand b. another picky player might be just the opposite, liking brand b disks but not brand a. It can sometimes boil down to compatibility, and what type of disks that particular player likes, rather than the absolute quality of the disk or the burn.

I would think for best compatibility, use good quality media that has a good reputation, use bitset +r disks, and learn to scan your disks for errors to ensure that the media is getting along with the burner/firmware. Its just my opinion, but scanning can be even more important now than it ever has been in the past, as the selection of good 16x media is not near as good as the selection of good 8x and 4x media that we had in the past. Compatibility between various drives seems to be a bit worse too.

Interesting thread - I have quite a few collected DVD players I use for testing, one of them is an APEX AD1200 (fussy player) and a Toshiba SD3990, excellent quality player but fussy too. The toshibas seem to like the -R better than the +R, even when bitset for some reason. Example, I have some old FUJI DVD+R 8x (RITEKR03) and they barely get detected and all I get are green and purple cubes and pausing constantly, even with bitset discs. Contrary to what I thought, burning speed seems to affect playability on some players - to me it’s still a data disc and it should be burnt at its rated speed on a quality disc. Nonetheless, I burn from now on all my discs at 8x, and use unbranded Taiyo Yuden +R discs and they are played fine by my fussy players and all players. I don’t know why some people don’t like Toshiba - My Toshiba SD3990 produces excellent quality video and audio, and it has a variable brightness and detail control, something you don’t see in other players or only see ON/OFF, this one has about 20 steps control, it plays DivX, MPEG ISO (CD and DVD), PAL VCD/SVCD/DVD, Mp3, you name it…and well built.

Some players were/are never designed to read -/+r disks, so when they identify themselves as such, the player says to itself, unsupported disk (particularly with older players). -r has been around longer so it makes sense that more players would support it over +r. Bitset +r disks lie and identify themselves as dvd-rom disk so any player will try to read them (the reason that bitset +r is the most compatible). One thing that I learned when researching multiformat players is that most manufactures just buy one of the handfull of major chipsets and build a player around it. The chipset controls what can be played, so even on a recent model player, if the original design date of the chipset is older, it might play less formats (or play less formats well).

Another reason that I have heard people say is that cheaper players can actually do a better job as they do not do error correction etc. (or something along those lines) as well, which actually makes them blow past errors and problems (and probably skip in the video), but not freeze up on the spot. I think that is why early on the cheap apex players got such a good reputation for playing anything.
My cheapest no name (jsi, 30$) player will play anything including many formats it is not supposed to like nero digital and it rarely freezes up on a disk. y much more expensive philips player is not near as forgiving, both for what format or for the condition of the disk etc.

I would imagine that there are technical reasons beyond that such as certain players just liking the reflective nature of certain dyes on certain brands, or more forgiving with variations in how accurately the disk is burned (not only errors but accuracy of the locations of the pits), but I really don’t have the technical understanding to know about that for sure.